Peony Red

  ‘Thank you – honestly, don’t bother. But how about you? Shall I put the kettle on?’

  Miss Juliana declined and studied the little plaster on her arm. ‘Heaven knows what the doctor injected me with this time. A really young chap and, if you ask me, still a bit wet behind the ears. You should have seen the kerfuffle here – what a circus! The doctor, an ambulance with blue lights flashing and crew fussing over me. What was Angelina thinking of ? Her nerves are driving everyone crazy here – they’ll send me to an early grave, I swear.’

  ‘Your neighbour means well, and she’s looking after you; you can’t reproach her for that.’ Milena took a carafe from the table and poured some water into a glass.

  Miss Juliana drank and then leant back, exhausted.

  ‘How are you?’ Milena asked. ‘Feeling a bit better?’

  ‘Thank you, I’m well. And how are you?’ Miss Juliana looked around timidly and asked quietly, ‘Is he still here?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Don’t you know my cousin?’

  ‘Nicola?’ Milena shook her head. ‘But you talked about him last week.’

  ‘He’s so obstinate.’ Miss Juliana audibly drew breath through her nose. ‘This afternoon, for instance.’

  ‘Was that the reason for your dizzy spell?’ Milena interrupted.

  Miss Juliana shook her head. ‘Can I tell you what really happened?’

  ‘Only if it doesn’t upset you.’

  ‘My dear, I’m calmness personified, believe me. So, I’m sitting here at the window, writing up the household accounts, and I see, out there in the garden in the dusk, some strange people wandering around among the trees. I think to myself, that’s not on, strangers in our garden, and I’m about to call the police when I recognise him.’

  ‘Your cousin?’

  ‘Who else?’ Miss Juliana took another sip, and then gingerly put the glass back on the table. ‘Even if I’m only the old aunt, the cousin, part of the furniture here, like that battered pan hanging over the stove there – I’m still here. And I wonder: is it too much to ask that he might come in and say hello, or introduce me to his friends? What kind of behaviour is that?’

  ‘Are you sure that it was Nicola?’

  ‘I know what you’re trying to say: all cats look grey in the dusk. You’re talking like Angelina now.’

  Milena wasn’t deterred. ‘But your neighbour said that your cousin emigrated to Canada a long time ago.’

  ‘Angelina’s a chatterbox, but what she said is right. Yes, he did go to Canada, and you could say that he forgot all his manners over there among the lumberjacks.’

  ‘When did he leave?’ Milena leant forward. ‘Sixty years ago? How old would he be now? Eighty?’

  Miss Juliana stared into thin air, and Milena continued gently, ‘I don’t want to be impertinent. But could you have dreamt the story with Nicola, the scene in the garden?’

  ‘Do you know when I last had a dream?’ Miss Juliana leant forward. ‘That night when German bombs fell on Belgrade. We’d have all been burnt alive if my late mother hadn’t been there and called to me in the dream, “Get out, my child! You have to get out of there!”’

  ‘My God!’ Milena exclaimed. ‘And then?’

  ‘A catastrophe. Everything burnt, everything lost. The Albanian in the shed… burnt to a cinder. Thank God Uncle Lazarus didn’t live to see that.’ Miss Juliana propped herself up on the armrest and placed her index finger against her temple. ‘You know his shop? In Balkan Street, up there, on the corner of Queen Natalija Street. Two floors with the most beautiful furs, chandeliers on the ceilings, fifteen employees. We didn’t dare go in there, back then, when my father dropped me off here. We were country bumpkins, the poor relations. You know, if there was one wish I might have wanted fulfilled, I would have loved to have seen the shops in Budapest, Vienna and Paris. But, unfortunately, it never happened. I was only allowed to look at photographs.’

  ‘Didn’t Nicola want to take over the business?’ asked Milena on the off-chance. ‘Or had that ship already sailed?’

  ‘Let’s just say he had his mind on other things. He wanted to get away and have nothing more to do with the family. To be perfectly frank…’ She peered about furtively. ‘His gambling debts were probably the reason.’ She sighed. ‘How many years we waited for him to come back! Sophia had already given up hope, but for me it was always a consoling thought that he’d be standing outside that door again one day. And, you see, I was right all along. That’s exactly what happened. Though I’d pictured his return rather differently, if I’m honest. But we’ve all changed, haven’t we?’ She tugged a handkerchief from her sleeve and blew her nose. ‘No, I mustn’t grumble. My dear, whatever’s up with you? do you have to leave already?’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’ Milena wrote her telephone number in large numerals on the back of her business card. ‘My son’s waiting outside and my mother’s at home. But if anything untoward occurs again, like strangers in your garden, or if something strikes you as odd, you call me. Agreed?’

  Miss Juliana looked at the numbers, tucked the card into the sleeve of her woollen jacket and said in a chiding voice, ‘But I’ve been rabbiting on – you should have stopped me!’

  On the way home, Milena was deep in thought. An eightyyear-old cousin who returns home and strolls round the garden with strangers? That didn’t make sense. The old lady was lonely, was confusing the past and the present and had invented a unique world that most likely didn’t always tally with reality. But had she gone completely senile?

  After dinner, once Adam had gone to bed, Milena made herself a cup of tea and went to her room. She closed the door, sat down at her desk and took out the magazine Prominent! from her bag.

  As she was looking for her lighter, she suddenly remembered the gloves she’d noticed on Miss Juliana’s sideboard. Dark leather, and far too big for the hands of an old lady, surely? They were a man’s gloves, no question. Suddenly, there was a knock at the door.

  The door opened, Fiona walked in and Vera asked, ‘Do you have a moment?’

  Milena lit a cigarillo, blew the smoke into the air and watched the cat jump onto the desk as Vera strode across the room and pointedly opened the window.

  ‘I know,’ Milena said, ‘we shouldn’t have come back so late, with Adam having to get up early tomorrow. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Cruising around in a limousine, with a chauffeur! Congratulations, Adam’s really got a taste for that kind of life now.’ Vera bent down, picked up a book from the floor and put it on the bedside table.

  ‘Mum’, Milena sighed, ‘it’s almost eleven. And I still need to call Tanja. The driver and the delay in Mutap Street – well, it just happened that way.’

  ‘Interesting.’ Vera plumped up a cushion, energetically pummelling it into shape. ‘How exactly do things just happen that way?’

  ‘Look, I had a meeting with Alexander Kronburg. We talked and talked and lost track of time. So I went with him to the airport, so as to continue the conversation, and afterwards the driver took me back to town. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘May I ask what you had to discuss at such length – you and His Lordship?’

  Milena shook her head. ‘It’s complicated, and I haven’t had time to digest it yet.’

  ‘How could you have? You had to look after an old lady in Mutap Street. Like you had nothing better to do. But what am I getting so het up about anyway?’ Vera said, folding a T-shirt and hanging it over the armrest of a chair. ‘Here everyone just does as they please anyhow, so I’m not going to get upset about it anymore.’

  ‘Now listen to me,’ Milena said. ‘Miss Juliana’s an old woman. She spends her whole day just sitting in that ancient house, which is going to fall down around her ears soon, she only has one neighbour who looks out for her, and she’s clinging on to a life that doesn’t exist anymore, and the sheer effort of doing that takes everything out of her. When she sits in her vast kitchen she fancies she can see strangers in her garden, and
whenever she leaves the house she can’t find her way back.’

  Milena proceeded to tell Vera about her encounter with Miss Juliana in the market a few days previously, and how she’d spotted an ambulance in the driveway this evening.

  ‘Mutap Street’, Vera repeated pensively. ‘Do you mean that old, semi-derelict mansion, with the stucco work on the façade, which makes you wonder whether it’s still inhabited?’

  ‘Apparently, the family once owned a pretty big store, selling furs.’

  ‘Spajić’s, the furrier?’

  ‘Balkan Street. Did you know it?’

  ‘Your father’s grandmother had a muff that came from Spajić’s, I believe. Aunt Borka’s still got the moth-eaten thing. After all, it was from Spajić’s, where only the very best people shopped. Not to mention royalty.’ Vera picked up the magazine and looked at the picture on the cover. ‘Not our world. We’re partisans, always have been, but if you think you need to fraternise with these people – so be it. You’ll have your reasons, I don’t doubt.’

  ‘Mum?’

  Vera, whose hand was already on the door handle, turned around. ‘I know. I’m jealous. But what did you expect?’

  ‘The magazine.’ Milena held out her hand. ‘I still need to check something in it.’

  Vera closed the door behind her, and Milena turned to the ‘diary’ page. April seventeenth, Thursday – that was tomorrow. She pushed the cat aside and reached for the telephone.

  When Tanja picked up, Milena asked, ‘Were you sleeping already?’

  ‘Sleeping? How could I? I’ve listened to my voicemail three times, but I still can’t make head or tail of your message. What’s up?’

  Milena leant back. ‘I was thinking it’s time we went out again.’

  ‘Then we should go to the movies and have a drink afterwards – anything but Slobodan Božović’s fiftieth birthday party.’

  ‘So you’ve got an invitation?’

  ‘Of course I have. How do you think I pay for my plane tickets? His wife is a loyal customer of mine.’

  ‘Right then.’ Milena extinguished her cigarillo. ‘I’ll be your plus-one. It’ll be a laugh, and while we’re there –’

  ‘Those parties are no laugh,’ Tanja interrupted. ‘You know how these events are: women rabbiting on about their interior designers and personal trainers, while the men stare at their boobs and play pocket billiards.’

  ‘It has to do with the old couple who were murdered two weeks ago. Their house is a ruin, practically uninhabitable. I just have to find out –’

  ‘Sweetie, you never give up, do you?’

  ‘Does that mean we’re going, then?’

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Then Tanja said, ‘Absolutely not.’

  24

  Before Slobodan Božović became a politician, when he was just a little boy, he owned a stick that he had found near the barn – where the path led up to the privy, to be precise, almost at the dung heap. As he roamed around the countryside, he imagined that he was using the stick to defend his big sister, the house, the barn and everything dear to him.

  One day in the summer, he was sitting on watch again. His father was probably working in the fields, and his mother and sister were doing the laundry. Bees were humming over the stocks, which were in bloom, and the dog dozing under the farm cart was not stirring. Crouching down, Slobo ran from the water butt to the well, and from there to the poplars, and sneaked along the picket fence to the garden door. Runner beans and sunflowers provided cover, enabling him to reach the big meadow undetected. The grass had been mown, and clay bricks were lying around everywhere.

  Slobo looked at the evenly shaped blocks and imagined them to be not just bricks produced by his father and put out into the sun to dry, but something altogether more mysterious. As if extra-terrestrials had landed in the field and these strange objects were messages from a distant galaxy.

  Making contact by placing a naked foot on such an object became something of a test of courage. The smooth surface felt moist and pleasantly cool, while he found that shifting his weight forward onto one leg left an impression: the ball and heel were clearly visible and the toes less so.

  He hopped from one mud brick to another, and marked every one of them. That same evening he was summoned to the barn by his father.

  Slobo was made to fetch the whip down from the hook and hand it to his father, pull down his trousers and lie on his stomach over the milking stool. That was the usual procedure, but this time the blows on his back and naked backside were particularly heavy. Slobo grabbed his stick tightly, pressed his lips together and fixed his gaze on the stone floor. He heard his father wheezing, his sister screaming and his mother praying before everything went black before his eyes. For days he was lying on his stomach, and swore in his delirium never to forgive his father.

  Today, Slobodan had a son himself. He loved Oliver more than life itself, and would never be violent towards him. On the contrary. Oli was given everything other boys his age could only dream of: a PlayStation, tennis lessons, fencing instruction. When Oli said he wanted a trumpet, he got a trumpet, and if he decided the next day that he’d rather play percussion, then he got a set of drums. Slobodan swore on his mother’s life that there was no desire his son expressed that he wouldn’t fulfil. And when they exercised together – their father-son time, which Slobodan called ‘quality time’ – when they wrestled each other and sweated, Oli could test his strength and he could mould his character.

  For all that, however, Slobodan did not expect any gratitude, anything in return; it was all just a matter of course – he was his father, after all. Only in certain circumstances, when he issued certain orders and let his wishes be known in no uncertain terms, did he expect Oli to obey and not give him any lip. Was it too much to ask the boy to put on a tie and stand next to his father with a straight back at the reception in celebration of his fiftieth birthday?

  Slobodan’s hand had slipped while they had been wrestling. Oliver had been thrown across the room, and now, with the gash on his forehead, the brat had achieved what he wanted. Slobodan had no choice but to tell him to go up to his room, to stay there and under no circumstances to let any of the guests set eyes on him.

  As a precaution, and because he had no idea what the boy might get up to next in the coming hours, Slobodan had locked the door. That way, the little rascal could sit in front of the computer until late into the night and play computer games to his heart’s content, and be compensated by his mother for the pain suffered with inordinate amounts of ice cream and popcorn.

  Slobodan spotted his wife outside on the terrace, explaining to the young guy from the party service company where he was supposed to place the torches among the conifers and in the herbaceous border. Božena was wearing her white cocktail dress with the rhinestones, and her curves were so perfect that he could have raised her up onto the pedestal right next to the Venus statue. Sometimes he hated the woman.

  Not only because she mollycoddled the boy and used every opportunity to conspire against him. He hated her lying next to him in bed wearing her sleep mask and dental braces. He hated the satin bed linen, which made him feel cold, and the silicone implants in her breasts and bum which stopped him groping her like he had done in the past. He didn’t dare – he was afraid he’d damage something, and suspected that this suited Božena, that she was secretly paying him back for those little indiscretions he granted himself on the odd occasion, and for everything else he’d done to her. He missed his Božena from years gone by, the Božena with the rosy apple cheeks, whom he could tickle and fuck. Sometimes he missed that little vixen so much it physically hurt.

  He poured himself another drink, just a finger’s depth in the glass, and put his feet up. Once upon a time, he’d had the right telephone number for every occasion, his notebook bursting at the seams, back when one call would have been enough to have ten bitches queuing up if he’d wanted. While he was wallowing in nostalgia, he reflected that he’d
been indefatigable back then, constantly on the road, crossing the country and forever meeting people, especially farmers. He’d been the guy from the ministry, responsible for infrastructure projects, though the farmers probably didn’t know what that meant. He bought their land, putting more money on the table than they’d ever seen in their life. It was all done with a handshake and a signature and then came the convivial, social bit. He had a real knack back then, the right instinct.

  When the people took to the streets, demonstrating against the dictator, against corrupt politicians and civil servants who were lining their pockets at every possible occasion, he had grasped immediately what was up, and handed in his resignation to the perplexed minister – despite the fact that his pet project, his baby, had only just got off the ground and was coming along quite nicely. Corridor 17, the east–west arterial route, was designed to link Southern Serbia with Kosovo and bring prosperity to the region. He realised that the people hammering the cooking pots and blowing whistles out on the streets were full of rage and beyond the reach of reasonable arguments and explanations. His colleagues from the ministry didn’t get it, and continued to feather their own nests long after he’d cleared his desk.

  He shredded all his files, especially those referring to any transfers of ownership and the company he’d founded in his brother-in-law’s name. He put all his plans on ice: the property development project, the villa, the tennis court. He even got rid of the SUV he’d just purchased. Božena was at a complete loss. Overnight, he became a one-man band, a sole trader, but of the hands-on type, a self-made man. Wherever the need was greatest, he made generous donations – particularly schoolbooks and medication – and in this way got himself a lot of publicity for relatively little outlay. On these occasions – initially just small photo opportunities but later large-scale public forums – he talked about humanitarian values and global change, about economic boom and progress. What he said was credible and courageous, plus his timing was spot on and he found the right pitch. When the regime was consigned to the historical dustbin, it was almost a foregone conclusion that he would become the man to tackle the new tasks ahead.